Aims and objectives
The Bucha Adventist Historical Archive-Museum is the richest collection in Ukraine, and possibly in the world, of religious ephemera dating from the 17th to 20th century: samizdat, photographs, manuscripts, folk art, religious maps from Crimea (nowadays occupied by Russia). The collection contains unique and rare documents that shed light on lesser-known popular religious culture in Ukraine from the Imperial to the Soviet period. The archive was created a long time ago in Crimea and after the region's occupation in 2014 it was transferred to Bucha, where it was partly damaged (with digitised copies fully destroyed) during the occupation and massacre in February 2022.
Outcomes
The project established an on-site team comprising one professional archivist, one collection
creator, two students, and one research assistant funded through an external grant. The team received training in digitization equipment use, lighting techniques, image quality control, file management (renaming, exporting, and saving), backup procedures, metadata creation, and archival preservation techniques. Additional funding was obtained from the Irish Research Council to hire a research assistant, strengthening project capacity. The pilot digitization produced 60,000 digital copies of archival materials.
The original archival materials are housed at the Ukrainian Institute of Arts and Sciences and the Ukrainian Division of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Bucha, Ukraine. The archive suffered extensive damage during the Russian army's temporary occupation of the region in spring 2022, which severely impacted the building where the materials were stored. Restoration of the archival premises is ongoing, but full recovery remains a significant challenge. Many archival materials are still stored in unsuitable conditions, including non-archival cardboard boxes, in a facility that lacks proper heating and experiences high humidity levels, posing ongoing risks to their preservation.
Digital copies have also been securely deposited in the cloud storage of University College Cork. Plans are underway to make these materials accessible online through the university’s History Declassified Digital Archive.
The follow Methodology Report was submitted as part of the project outputs:
